Reading a couple of English articles on the Arabic language, especially Hachimi’s “The Urban and the Urbane: Identities, Language ideologies, and Arabic Dialects in Morocco” (2012), I felt a bit out of element: to me, there was something unusual about the lens through which the Arabic language was viewed in such writings. Much like a slowly recovering amnesiac, I made my way through a novel path in the not so novel territory of the Arabic language. Afterwards, I tried to pinpoint the factors that would make such texts somehow feel unfamiliar, not only to me but also probably more so to any monolingual Arab reader perusing a translated version of them. The factors that might be feeding such a sense of unfamiliarity often overlap yet can be generally imputed to differences in lexicon, genre, audience.
First of all, many English articles that investigate the Arabic language draw heavily on a repertoire of Western sociolinguistic terminology, such as “code-mixing” or “metalinguistic discourse.” Such terminology can definitely be translated using parallel Arabic words, for instance: المزج اللغوي for code-mixing and--according to Almaany Online Dictionary--خاص بالتحقيق في اللغة for “metalinguistic discourse.” Yet, even with optimal choices of diction, translation of these terms might well retain a sense awkwardness: while some of these terms can sound ambiguous to nonspecialist native-speakers of English, once translated into Arabic, they would sound even more intimidating, unnatural and ambiguous since the lexical pairs or morphemes that typically comprise them do not collocate in the Arabic corpora. As a step to abate such a sense of detachment between the translated text and the average Arab reader, a translator might add parenthetical explanations that simply and clearly break down the meanings of each of such terms. However, accompanying each new sociolinguistic term with parenthetical information, whether in footnotes or within the text, might distract the reader from the main argument in the article and render the experience of reading choppy and incoherent. Moreover, adding a definition to every newly-introduced sociolinguistic concept still does not take away from the daunting sense of remote technicality that a multitude of “unnatural” jargon can add to a text.
Specifics like lexicon are not the only type of hurdles that make a translator’s job harder when dealing with English sociolinguistic texts. Bigger picture issues, especially genre compatibility, can compound a translator’s struggle. Yes, academic journals and articles do exist in the Arab world. However, they are not that familiar to the average monolingual Arab reader, who can feel a bit intimidated by their direct, linear style; complex argumentative, hypothetical logic; relatively extravagant citations; lack of aesthetic flowery phrases; and absence of religious sovereignty over the writer’s objectivity (which means, for instance, that a writer would try not to investigate an issue with unnegotiable, pre-set linguistic ideologies that take fus7a for granted as the inherently privileged variety since it is the language of the Quran or--according to religious myth--the only language deserving to be spoken in Eden). Furthermore, while great emphasis is placed in Western academia on academic articles (say to reach a tenure-track position), the unfamiliarity of the genre, with all the elements that constitute it, is often reflected in the educational systems in the Arab World. I have been a university student majoring in a branch of humanities for 3 years in a prominent Arab country, yet I have never been assigned a single academic article to read. I have never been assigned an academic article/essay to write either. Instead, I, like the rest of my peers, had to listen passively to what the teacher stated as a foregone truth and recycle the textbook in the uncreative tests given at the end of the semester. Such educational experiences can guarantee a sense of unfamiliarity with the basic principles that constitute the genre of academic articles: the openness to diverse (and sometimes contradictory) perspectives as well as the ability to adopt an independent opinion that challenges other authorial voices and then logically and linearly support it. Taking these implications in the target culture, the translator needs to figure out strategies to ease the reader into the almost wholly unfamiliar genre of academic articles, which is unequivocally a very tasking mission.
The overarching factor that ties both lexicon and genre together is the audience and their socially constructed linguistic ideologies. The writers of English academic articles fictionalize--in the process composing a text--a certain speech community that acknowledges certain ways of looking at language; meanwhile, the translator has to present the same text to another audience with a whole set of different expectations. The traditional way in which Arab readers are used to think about the Arabic language is cemented in educational institutions. In departments of Arabic, professors tend to uncritically teach privileged texts from an un-expanding literary cannon (e.g. through instructing college-level students to memorize texts and the definitions of the archaic vocabulary they include). Typical approaches to language also entail the study of rigorous grammar that dictate the "correct" way to use language, which is far removed from the functionality of language in everyday life that Western sociolinguistic articles look at. Indeed, the study of Arabic in most contexts in the Arab world relegates language to a secondary role: it gets the students lost in archaic, ever-exalted texts and prescriptive language rules and, thus, blinds them to the dynamics of power relations revealed in "usual," everyday language of ordinary people. Of course, blinding the public eye to issues of hierarchy, independence, and identity reaffirmation and reinvention in everyday language serves the purposes of certain social, political and religious powers.
With that mentioned, the difficulties posed by lexicon, genre, and the deeply entrenched linguistic ideologies of audience should not be thought of as stereotypical constraints that result in intercultural prejudice. Rather, they should be considered as eye-openers for researchers to investigate ways of handling such issues and for translators and editors to adopt relevant solutions. Most significantly, readers themselves should acquire an awareness of these factors and develop personal habits that can help them cope up with the difficulties they pose, rather than let such gaps dampen their passion for reading translated articles on Arabic sociolinguistics.
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